


pick up the pieces

by krakens



Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-08-28
Updated: 2015-12-13
Packaged: 2017-12-24 22:13:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,073
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/945269
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krakens/pseuds/krakens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scenes, interludes, etc.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Red Team III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thirty hours after the Genoa report airs, Sloan and Don make a coffee run.

After the emergency middle-of-the-night staff meeting, there’s an emergency middle-of-the-night flurry of activity. Sloan’s busy, and he is too, so it’s not altogether weird that he doesn’t see her for a couple hours after that. He almost forgets about her outburst completely, because he’s running on almost no sleep and a _lot_ of adrenaline, but then he sees her slipping out of her office, bag over her shoulder, looking battle-worn. He checks his watch. It’s pushing four in the morning.

He watches her as she heads down the stairs and by the time he’s determined that she’s probably leaving the office for the night he’s already halfway across the bullpen in her direction. She sees him coming and her gaze skips over him, but not in the cool practiced way he thinks she was probably going for.

“Hey,” he says, trying to catch her attention as she passes. She keeps walking and he begins to follow, but she stops and turns on her heel so sharply that he nearly runs right into her.

“I haven’t gotten a good night’s sleep since Thursday,” she says, taking a deep deliberate breath mid-sentence. “And it’s the middle of the night, and there are about a million things that still need doing, and I can’t deal with you being mad at me right now, Don. I just can’t. I don’t have the bandwidth.” She turns and starts walking again, waving her hand as she goes. “You can chew me out tomorrow if you want,” she promises in a mumbled aside he barely catches.

Because he also hasn’t gotten a good night’s sleep since Thursday, it takes him a second to catch up.

“I’m not mad at you,” he says as he follows her towards the elevators. She tosses him a sidelong glance as he matches her stride. “I’m just… taking your temperature.”

“Why?”

“Because it seemed to me like _you_ might actually be mad at _me._ ”

She lets out a strangled sigh and stops by the elevator, leaning against the wall without pressing the button. “I’m not. I’m just…”

“Taking responsibility,” he says. She stares at him, just a little bit slack jawed. Her lips are barely parted. “You said _we_ ditched out of the interview.”

“General we,” she tries, pointing around aimlessly for a moment before landing on the ACN logo at the end of the hall. He raises his eyebrows and she tears her gaze away from his, staring over his shoulder. Her mouth hangs open in a soft circle now as she heaves another deeper sigh, leaning against the wall again, arms folded behind her back.

“You know you’re not—”

“I was in the control room,” she says. She says it more like it’s a clandestine admission than a statement of fact, and he can’t help but stare at her for a second before he responds.

“So?”

“I was in the control room, and I was distracting you—”

“Come _on_.”

“—distracting you while you had a guest live on the air.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it.”

Her eyebrows shoot up and her face twists into a delicate expression of skepticism. “So I’m not a distraction.”

“I—” he chokes out, unable to think of a single response that wouldn’t be hugely incriminating. He jams his hands into his pockets and looks back towards the bullpen, where everyone is still wrapped up in their own personal spheres of damage control. “I can multitask, Sloan. It’s basically my job.”

“But if I hadn’t been distracting you—”

“Seriously, come on.”

“Stop interrupting me. If I hadn’t been there you’d’ve been listening to what Sweeney was saying and gotten Elliot to get him back on track sooner, and then he wouldn’t have mentioned…” This is apparently as far as she’d thought that speech through, because she looks confused and lost all of a sudden and she just gives up. It’s uncharacteristic of her, shooting from the hip, throwing in the towel. But it’s been a long weekend for everyone.

“Then we’d be sitting on a time bomb. It would’ve come out eventually.”

“Not live. Not like that.”

“Maybe not.” They lapse into silence. Sloan still hasn’t called the elevator. “But it wasn’t your fault _or_ your responsibility, so.”

“Still.” She shifts in place, uncrossing her arms from behind her back. “Normally, I wouldn’t have even…” She brushes her hair out of her face, pressing her palms to her temples for a moment. “I was anxious, and I didn’t want to be by myself, so I was there even though I knew I shouldn’t’ve been, and that was selfish.”

“I was stressed out too, you know.”

“I know. That’s what I’m saying. I shouldn’t have—”

“I’m glad you did,” he says, even though she asked him not to interrupt. “I like having you around.” The second half of her sentence visibly dies on her lips as she stares at him. Someday, he thinks, he might strike the chord between too vague and not vague enough. She doesn’t seem to have a rejoinder, so he clears his throat and continues. “Are you heading home?”

“No,” she says, hitting the call button. The elevator dings immediately. “Coffee run. Starbucks opens in ten minutes.” She steps into the elevator and looks at him, issuing a silent invitation with a quirk of her head and a lift of her eyebrows. He follows without putting any thought to it and soon they’re walking down the street. Around them is the usual leisurely bustle of the city in the middle of the night, an entirely different world from the hectic bluster of the office.

“I should apologize to Elliot,” she says as they cross a street. “For snapping at him in front of everyone.”

“I don’t think he’s mad at you,” Don says.

“Still.”

“We’re all on the same team,” he says. She purses her lips.

“I know.”

They walk in silence the rest of the way.

The barista at Starbucks recognizes Sloan but doesn’t say where from. She doesn’t follow up and plays it off like it’s not a big deal – she informs him in a sardonic aside that she’s finally coming to terms with her stardom – but she pulls her hood up and hides behind the bill of her baseball cap as they wait for their order, hunched up to make herself seem nondescript and small.

On the walk back, she chats idly about some indie film premiere she’s planning on attending. When her gaze flicks up to the ACN building looming in the distance, she purses her lips and glances at her feet.

“What do you think is going to happen tomorrow?” she asks.

“Well,” he says. “I strongly believe that together Will, Mac, and Charlie are capable of accomplishing nearly anything, so they’ll either fix everything or become a subversive vigilante team of—”

“Awful,” she says before he can even get the wisecrack out, but she also smiles.

“I know,” he says. “I’m _really_ tired, I can’t work in this condition.” She chuckles and shakes her head.

“Really, though.”

“They’ll fix it,” he says, wishing he believed himself. Sloan clearly doesn’t. She slackens her pace as they approach the ACN building. “Hey,” he says. “We did our jobs. They can do theirs.”

She’s all but slowed to a stop, meandering along the sidewalk, coffee clutched between her hands. When her response comes, it is faint. “Did we, though?”

“Did we…?”

“Do our jobs,” Sloan says. “You, me, Jim. They brought us in to be the Red Team, and none of us, not _one_ of us felt right about it.”

“Hey,” he says again.

“Tell me I’m wrong,” she challenges, and for someone who professes to being wrong most of the time she sounds pretty sure of herself. “Tell me that you haven’t been feeling weird about this since they decided to run it. Tell me you didn’t get that feeling in the pit of your stomach that you get when you _know_ you’re doing something wrong.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Yeah.”

“You’re just anxious about the _absolutely_ ,” he says.

“Maybe,” she says. “But it doesn’t feel like that’s what it is.”

(Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, but he really does think that was the second he felt everything really irreparably fall apart.)

“Maybe you should go home and get some sleep,” he suggests. She gives him a withering glance. “The mess will still be here tomorrow morning,” he says. “You might as well try.”

“I could say the same to you,” she points out. “Are you going to go home?”

“No,” he says. “I have to be—”

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m staying.” There’s a beat in the conversation. “With you,” she adds, squelching the vagueries.

He doesn’t comment on it, though, and as they walk back to the office the space and silence between them seems more comfortable than before. After all, there’s not much left to be said and plenty of work to do.


	2. Election Night, Part I

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Taylor’s been trying to reserve judgment about the social lives of the ACN staff, but it isn’t easy given how forthright they all are.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> guess who's got two thumbs and just rewatched this whole show in 2 days

Taylor’s only been at ACN for a few hours. She hasn’t even been on the air yet. Somehow, everything about Jim Harper is already making more sense to her.

Everyone’s wound and up and excited to do well, but there’s a sort of grim finality to the buzz in the air. She’d only been here half an hour when she’d first heard the rumor about the senior staff resigning come morning – resigning alongside Will McAvoy and MacKenzie McHale and Charlie Skinner, not because they’ll be fired if they don’t, but because it’s the _right_ thing to do. Taylor thinks it’s pretty stupid of them, but it works out for her in the long run, and the loyalty’s impressive, so there’s that.

And, yeah, Jim’s predilection for rallying the troops to honorable action makes much more sense in context.

Still, she can’t say she isn’t enjoying herself. There’s a certain charm to the easy banter the senior staff tosses back and forth. Elliot and Sloan aren’t bad company, either, even though they’ve been quibbling all evening like schoolchildren. The three of them are idling in hair and makeup, waiting to hear from Jim, when someone pokes his head into the room. Taylor recognizes him as Elliot’s EP and knows they’ve been introduced already this evening, but can’t call his name to mind.

“Elliot,” he says.

“Yeah,” Elliot says without looking up from his phone, which he’s been intensely fixated on for the last five minutes.

“They need you in the bullpen for a run-through,” he says. Elliot stands up and grumbles something unintelligible and moves to exit. The EP stops him and fixes his tie, more like a doting mother than a professional colleague. Elliot bats his hand away before the tie gets fixed.

“Jesus,” Elliot mutters as he leaves. Taylor turns her attention back to her own phone before she realizes that the EP hasn’t left yet. She glances up again.

He’s just sort of lingering in the doorway, gaze fixed on Sloan. Last Taylor checked, all Sloan was doing was looking at her phone and sometimes attempting to scratch the bridge of her nose without messing up her makeup. Nothing that warrants the downright smitten look on his face.

Taylor’s been trying to reserve judgment about the social lives of the ACN staff, but it isn’t easy given how forthright they all are. Sloan isn’t seeing anyone currently; she learned this from a minor verbal scuffle Sloan and Elliot had been having about five minutes prior.

With that in mind she can’t help thinking that the EP is way out of his league with her. It’s not exactly an original story, though. Taylor would bet that Sloan has a lot of men unrequitedly pining after her around here, what with her large reserves of intelligence, beauty, and obliviousness.

“How’re you doing?” he asks after a long moment. Sloan doesn’t seem surprised or perturbed that he’s still here and doesn’t even look up from her phone.

“Oh, you know,” she says, dragging the last word out.

“I only ask,” he says, entering the room and approaching her. He leans against the makeup counter. Taylor can see Sloan’s annoyance mounting: her gaze remains on her phone really deliberately, and her lips press into a tight line. “Because sometimes when you’re stressed out about something you get weirdly fixated on it, and you can’t afford to be distracted tonight.”

“I’m fine, Don,” she says, not sounding as snappish as Taylor would’ve expected. She finally looks up at him as she continues. “But if I _were_ stressed out about… whatever, that wouldn’t’ve been a helpful thing to say to me. God, you look like crap,” she adds without segue, like she’s only just noticed.

“Thanks.”

“Seriously, when’s the last time you got a full night’s sleep?”

He checks his watch, heaving a whistly comedic sigh as he does.

“If you don’t know off the top of your head, it’s been too long,” Sloan tells him, mostly frankness but some concern.

“I’m pretty sure Mac’s been up for five days straight,” he says. “Hassle her.”

“I don’t have to hassle her,” Sloan says. “She’s a superhero. She can do anything.”

“Again, thanks.”

“Plus she doesn’t want us worrying about…” Sloan trails off, glancing towards Taylor like she forgot she was in the room. Taylor shrugs. She’s not here to start rumors. Even if she was, she’s gotten plenty of them already from the other senior staff members. “Things,” Sloan concludes anticlimactically. But then she continues nonetheless: “I visited my parents this weekend and told them I'm resigning."

Don’s mouth turns down at the corners and he glances over at the posters of ACN’s anchors that line the walls. He nods. “How are they?”

“Disappointed,” Sloan says.

“They’re in good company,” he says.

“Yeah,” she agrees.

“We’re going to land our feet, you know.”

“Who, you and me?”

“No, everyone,” he says. A beat. “But especially you and me. You know why?”

“Why?”

“I’m crafty and you’re fiscal.”

“You can’t really describe a _person_ as _fiscal_ ,” Sloan says. “Besides—”

“You know what I meant.”

“I don’t wanna work on Wall Street,” she whines, play-acting at complaint. Really she sounds kind of reassured, at least to Taylor’s ear.

“Well, the night’s not over yet,” he replies, clapping her on the shoulder as he leaves.

Taylor lets the interaction settle for a second after he goes, but she doesn’t wait too long, because Elliot’s certainly coming back soon.

“Boyfriend?” she asks.

“Huh?” Sloan says. Taylor gestures out the door where Don just exited. It takes another second for her meaning to sink in with Sloan. “ _Oh_ , no,” Sloan says. “No, no. He’s—” She stops to think. “You’ve spent some time with Jim, right?”

“Sure,” Taylor says.

“You know who Maggie is?”

“I’ve heard the name,” Taylor says. Sloan nods, very serious, and she figures Sloan figures that was a real safe bet.

“Don’s Maggie’s ex-boyfriend,” she says, as if this should put all the puzzle pieces in place in Taylor’s head.

It doesn’t, though, and instead raises a new and very important question. “Why is Jim Harper the keystone of your social circle?”

Sloan thinks on it for a long, dumbfounded second. “I don’t know,” she finally says, turning her attention back to her cell phone.

Deep down Taylor knows that it’s probably ethically bankrupt of her to mess with these people, between the fact that they all seem fairly socially inept and their looming unemployment. But the house is already burning down. Stoking the embers can’t hurt at this point.

“Is he seeing anyone now?” Taylor asks. Sloan, again, takes a second to key in on what exactly she’s talking about.

“Jim?” Sloan asks.

“No, Don,” Taylor says.

Sloan narrows her eyes, an expression that seems almost involuntary (he might not out of league after all). “I wouldn’t really know,” Sloan says in a way that is too casual to be casual. “You’d have to ask him.”

“Maybe if he’s still got a job tomorrow morning,” Taylor says. “I’m not really sure I want to get involved in Six Degrees of Jim, anyway.” This seems to placate Sloan well enough. She doesn’t strike Taylor particularly hard to please, though, so it doesn’t count as a particular triumph.

* * *

She stays through the impromptu engagement celebration, not wanting to give the impression of being a sore loser or a spoilsport. It’s nice, anyway, to see the turnaround in morale from earlier in the evening. Still, while she’s been warmly welcomed, she can tell it’s not really her place to be, and after an hour decides to head home for the night.

On her way out she remembers she left her thermos in the hair and makeup room, and it’s there that she happens upon Sloan and Don, who have been conspicuously missing for the last ten minutes.

“Jeez, sorry,” Taylor says, hanging in the doorway. They heard her come in, so they had just enough time to disentangle themselves, but it’s pretty clear from their general state of chagrin and flushedness that they snuck off primarily to make out like teenagers at homecoming. “I’m going to go,” she says, turning around.

“Uh, it’s alright,” Don says, idly pushing some papers on the makeup counter around like this might convince her he’d been reading them.

Because she wants her thermos back, she ducks in to grab it before making a hasty retreat.

“Given our earlier conversation,” Sloan says before she makes it out of the room. “I can see how this might look kind of strange to you.”

“And yet it isn’t the strangest thing I’ve seen this evening by a long shot, so—”

“It’s important to me that you know I wasn’t lying,” Sloan says. “This is a recent development of only a few hours ago.”

“I don’t need the details,” Taylor says, but the Sloan train barrels right on through the station.

“For someone in his line of work, Don isn’t very good at clear-cut communication,” Sloan begins to explain. Taylor doesn’t have to cut her off this time.

“She doesn’t need the details,” Don reiterates.

“Right,” Sloan says.

“If you could not mention it, though,” Don says, scratching the back of his head.

“Sure,” Taylor says, one foot over the threshold. “But if you’re concerned with discretion you might want to find a door that locks.”

“Yup,” Don concedes sheepishly after a moment, and with that Taylor makes her exit.

ACN, she thinks once she’s clear and free on the sidewalk. Hell of a place.


End file.
